A cup-filling unit for a comestible item, especially a dairy product, can have a circulating feed means or conveyor which carries a plurality of cup receptacles positioned in rows transverse to a feed direction of cup feed paths.
Aligned along the paths are a number of workstations, particularly a cup feed station, a cover mounting station, a closing station and a cup removing station running in temporally equal feed cycles in succession, i.e. operating in the cadence at which the conveyor is stepped.
The plurality of column-like cup and/or cover stacks along the cup feed paths can be inclined to the stack axes and simultaneously fed to the shafts of a cup and/or cover magazine.
In the known cup-filling unit, cup stacks are fed rowwise along an inclined plane to the cup feed magazines. This inclined plane is extended in front of the shafts of the cup delivery magazine and positioned on the front side of the cup-filling unit. The known cup-magazine refilling unit permits continuous automatic feed of a large number of cups which considerably operation of cup-filling apparatus at high rates of 10,000 to 20,000 cups per hour. However currently the column-like cup stack must be supplied with an ergonometrically unsatisfactory input height of about 1.8 m which makes handling difficult.